Democratic Party makes creepy French connection

Created 04/07/2003 - 11:00pm

Last Wednesday, right around the time U.S. forces were wading into the thick of the battle, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, called for a halt to the war: "Rescue this nation from a war that is wrong, that is unjust, that is immoral."

Meanwhile, Sen. John Kerry, the nominal front-runner for the nomination, declared, "What we need now is not just a regime change in Saddam Hussein and Iraq, but we need a regime change in the United States."

Kerry and Kucinich are simply this week's poster boys for what we might call the Frenchification of the Democratic Party. France's opposition to America bares a striking resemblance to the Democratic Party's opposition to President Bush. French President Jacques Chirac has overplayed his hand to the point where he is definitively anti-American. When asked recently if he wanted the United States to win the war, France's foreign minister answered with a verbal shrug.

Part of the problem is France's leaders have spent so long cultivating widespread anti-American sentiment, they are now constrained by what their constituencies will allow. The Democrats are suffering from a similar problem. While it's certainly unfair to call rank-and-file Democrats "anti-American," it's increasingly clear that a very active core of the Democrat base is so anti-Bush so as to make it difficult to tell the difference.

Pro-war senators Richard Gephardt, Joe Lieberman and John Edwards have all been greeted by hecklers shouting things like "Shame! Shame!" at Democratic events. And Hollywood liberals who write big checks to Democrats honestly believe that President Bush is invading Iraq to send profits to Big Oil or to distract from various domestic problems. In other words, the political gravity in the Democratic Party is pulling everybody to the left.

Indeed, these gravitational forces have turned Kerry into a pretzel. He voted to authorize the use of force last fall but is now borrowing the protesters' favorite line and calling for "regime change" in Washington.

Meanwhile, polls are showing wide support from average Americans, many of whom are Democrats. Indeed, roughly 50 percent of Democrats support the war, according to polls taken before and after the war started. Seventy-eight percent of white Americans are in favor of war, according to a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll. Plus, 29 percent of blacks, the most reliably Democratic demographic, are in favor of war. If that were to translate into equivalent support at the polls, Bush would win in a historic landslide.

Regardless, if the war ends well, this could spell huge problems for the Democratic Party as President Bush's approval ratings will soar once again. Of course, Democrats argue that the same thing happened in 1991, and the first President Bush lost to Bill Clinton. That's true. But the precedent breaks down for two reasons.

First, not only are Democrats aware of the lessons of 1992, so are the Republicans. Talk to White House insiders and they will tell you how well they've learned the lessons of Bush I. This White House is much more in sync with domestic considerations than the former. And if the economy gets better by Labor Day 2004, domestic issues won't even be an issue.

But more importantly, the analogy to 1991 doesn't work because the times are truly different. We are not merely at war with Iraq; we are at war with global terrorism (a useful euphemism for Islamic terrorism). This will not go away when the battle in Iraq is over.